Pontiac mayor vetoes council resolution against EM's final order

Aug. 27, 2013

Leon Jukowski

Written by

Detroit Free Press Staff Writer

Pontiac Mayor Leon Jukowski on Tuesday vetoed a resolution passed by City Council members that said the city was in an emergency because strict operating rules left by the city’s outgoing emergency manager were illegal.

Jukowski called the resolution “unintelligible, and therefore unenforceable.”

Members of the City Council met Monday night in a special meeting and voted 7-0 for the resolution, which calls on Jukowski, as well as outgoing emergency manager Louis Schimmel and “other agents of the state,” to “cease and desist immediately” following Schimmel’s final order of operating rules.

Schimmel issued his final order before stepping down Aug. 19. At that time, Gov. Rick Snyder praised Schimmel’s two years of oversight of Pontiac’s finances, which included balancing the budget of the long-troubled city while dramatically improving police response times and other city services.

The 13-page final order says it is “binding on the local elected and appointed officials and employees” of Pontiac, according to the state law that empowers emergency managers of insolvent local governments — Public Act 436. The final order is to be enforced by a transition advisory board, whose four members were named last week by Snyder, and who include Schimmel.

According to the state law, the board will monitor Pontiac’s finances for as long as necessary to ensure there are no new problems, according to a statement from the governor’s office last week. Jukowski, a lawyer, said the City Council’s resolution was legal nonsense.

“These kinds of actions by the City Council could keep us under the transition advisory board indefinitely. Council has got to stop being stuck on stupid,” Jukowski said.

Before the city was under an emergency manager, City Council members received about $15,500 a year with benefits. Today they meet once a week and receive $100 per meeting. The council is to meet at 6 p.m. Thursday in City Hall, 47450 Woodward, and likely will override the mayoral veto with a two-thirds majority vote, Jukowski added.

Council member Mary Pietila said Monday she and others were concerned “about just about everything in this final order,” including Schimmel’s demand that no visitor to council meetings speak for more than two minutes.

“That’s not financial. He’s going way beyond” the state-approved powers of a financial manager, Pietila said.

Schimmel said Tuesday he issued a detailed final order because “after you’ve done all this work (to balance the budget), you don’t want to see what happened in Ecorse or Hamtramck.” In those cities, Schimmel was appointed by governors to fix their finances, then left only to see local officials “go back to their old ways” and need a second round of state oversight in a few years, he said.

In response to the resolution, “I would ask, where has the council been while I was there? Not one of them came to me to sit down and discuss the deplorable condition of the city’s finances,” Schimmel said.